1. Field of the Invention
This invention generally relates to methods and systems for scrolling through rows of data, which for example may be identified as a result of a search query. More particularly, the preferred embodiment of the invention provides a procedure and mechanism for jumping through the rows, and is very well suited for scrolling through data sets that have a very large number of rows.
2. Background Art
Presentation of data from a relational database has always been concerned with limiting the results of unbounded queries. For example, this is achieved in the Enterprise Application Development Platform (EADP) by using the ability of DataBase 2 (DB2) to limit the results returned in the result set, and then providing for scrolling forward or backward through the data.
The problem with this approach is the increasing popularity of search style results pages to display data contained in a relational database. These pages can allow jumping to, for example, page 400 of the results. If twenty rows are displayed per page, this requires jumping to row 7980 of the result set. It is not practical to process 8000 rows to determine which ones to show; however, it is not a trivial matter to determine by any other means which row is the 7980th in a result set.